CFP: Challenging the past/diversifying the future, HUMLab and Gothenburg

Challenging the Past / Diversifying the Future – A Critical Approach to Visual and Multi-Sensory Representations for History and Culture

Paper, poster and panel proposals deadline: November 20.

In collaboration with HUMlab in Umeå and Visual Arena in Gothenburg, the Heritage Initiative at the University of Gothenburg reach out to scholars and practitioners who study the implementation, importance, and potential of visual, audible and multi-sensory representations to challenge and diversify our common understanding of history and culture.

This international, multidisciplinary conference, to be held in Gothenburg on March 18-20 2015, focuses on visualisations and multi-sensory representations of disparate cultures, geographies, and histories. Taking account of how cultural ideas, traditions and practices are constructed (and are constructing), transferred and disseminated in society, the goal of the conference is to connect a wide range of researchers and practitioners within heritage studies, digital humanities, history and adjoining disciplines. The conference is designed to generate further methodological and theoretical insights and inspire scholarly experimentation through visual and multi-sensory arrangements.

* How visual, audible, and multi-sensory representations can challenge, diversify or uproot well established notions that compose currently dominant and (often problematic) ideas of place, people and culture.

* Alternative modes of archiving narratives and other modes of cultural production

* The ways in which cultures and heritage are interpreted and practiced within the politics of memory production and identity/subjectivity politics

* The ways in which visual tropes are used in connection to the commodification and consumption of the past; and how cultures, through the visual representation thereof, are being globalised as an assemblage of agreed upon symbols.

* The importance of technological tools in the process of representation.

Submission of Abstracts

Abstracts for poster presentations, research papers (20 min.), demonstrations, workshops, panels, and organised sessions on the conference themes will be accepted until November 20, 2014. They should be a maximum of 300 words in English. Please send your abstracts to Dr Anna Foka anna.foka@humlab.umu.se.